Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex and vital part of any organization’s website.
One of the more complex components of SEO is technical SEO, which focuses on improving and optimizing the technical aspects of a website. Technical SEO improves a website’s speed and makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand. It is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on optimizing elements on your website itself.
Why technical SEO matters
You want your website to be fast, easy to use, and clear for your users. Technical SEO is a big part of how to make that happen. These factors are also crucial to search engines when they evaluate your site to determine where it should fall in the ranks.
Search engines also look at other technical aspects of your website when determining rank, including your structured data, because that can help search engines crawl your site.
Now let’s take a look at some of the ways to identify if a site has been technically optimized.
Site Speed
It is no secret that a website needs to load quickly; research conducted by Google has shown that if a site takes more than three seconds to load, 53% of mobile users will leave (1). This alone makes technical SEO worthwhile because you can speed up your site with it. Since Google knows that people prefer a fast site, it factors that into its ranking systems as well. In May, Google will be making page experience a ranking factor; so how people experience your site will matter even more in your search engine ranking, making speed even more important.
Search engines can crawl it correctly
Search engines have robots that crawl websites, following links to discovery on a website. Having a good structure for your internal linking is important because it shows the robots what the order of importance is on your site.
You can give directions to the robots on your site with the robots.txt file. You can use it to instruct them to not follow links on a page, not show results of a page crawled in the search engine results, or not to crawl a page at all. However, it is important that you are cautious when giving directions on your robots.txt file; sometimes, people will accidentally block them from crawling an important page. The code in this file is supposed to tell browsers how your site should work and look, so it can hurt your SEO if it ends up blocked. It is important to only have an expert work on your robots.txt file for this reason.
It has an XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is a list of all of the pages on a website, essentially serving as a roadmap for search engines. It allows you to make sure that a search engine will not miss something important on your site. Typically, the XML sitemap is organized into categories of some sort, usually posts, tags, pages, or something similar. It also lists the last modified date for each page and the number of images on each page.
If your site has a strong internal linking structure that connects everything cleanly, the crawling robots should not need the XML sitemap. However, even if you may not need one, it is always a good idea to have one to make things that much easier on search engines. If a site has been technically optimized, it has an XML sitemap.
Structured data
Structured data is used to help a search engine better understand your site and business. It also gives you the opportunity to provide Google with more details about the products you offer. Structured data has a specific format, so it is easy for a search engine to find it and understand it. It also gives you the opportunity to get rich results for your content, which are the search results that have details or stars that stand out.
There are no dead links
You visit a website that appears to be filled with the exact information you are looking for. Then, you begin clicking the links, and instead of going to the landing page full of helpful information, you reach a 404 error. We have all been there, and it is frustrating when visiting a site. Search engines also dislike those dead links, and even if they are hidden from visitors, if the crawlers run into them, they can begin to lower your rank. When a site has been technically optimized, these 404 pages are removed.
While your site may have some dead links, maintaining technical SEO can reduce them. You can redirect those dead links to live pages that are related, so you do not have people stumbling upon them.
There are no duplicate pages
Duplicate pages are another thing that can hurt your SEO. It is confusing for both visitors to your site and the robots crawling it when they find multiple pages with the same content on your site. If you have three pages that have the same content, Google does not know which page should be ranked higher, so it may end up ranking all three pages lower.
Avoiding duplicate pages is harder than you think. Sometimes, different URLs can show the same content, and while a visitor may not notice, a search engine will. Technical SEO can solve this by setting a page as a canonical URL, which tells search engines which page is the original and should be ranking.
The site is secure
The safety and privacy of visitors on a site are incredibly important these days, and a site that has been technically optimized is secure. Since site security is so important, search engines have made it a ranking factor. You can implement HTTPS on your site to keep the information on your site safe for you and your users. This is an important part of technical SEO that needs to be addressed when optimizing a website.
References
(1) “Google: 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load.”
Kirkpatrick, David. Marketing Dive, September 12th 2016.
